#how writing plays such important role in ther relationship. is change. is permanence. is what binds them together and they cannot avoid it

[juryokunojikan]

Was remembering the Neapolitan Novels yesterday and it immediately hit me the scene where Elena finds her child and Lila's having sex and ponders whether she'd wanted to do the same with her growing up, and how she didn't out of fear of punishment. And just... the ease with which she admits this and then moves on like it's nothing, maybe because there's nothing she can do anymore? How her wish to make a life together with Lila, whether romantic or platonic, couldn't happen due to their circumstances and now they have to look at each other across a forked path?

And yet, despite Lila's physical absence at her side, she's right there in every word Elena writes. Because writing is the space where the two of them come together, whether they intended it or not. First as a shared dream of advancing in life, later as a tool Elena uses to try to hold on to a desired form of herself (a form close to Lila's, whose writing she admires, and far from everything she rejects about her hometown, so she can avoid repeating what her mother came to be), writing is presented as possibility of transforming themselves that's different, and preferable, to sexual reproduction.

It's also a chance to rescue an untold experience, as Lila's writing inadvertently shapes hers, even when Lila is deprived of her own voice and becomes unable to follow her on that path. A part of Lila always remains and seeps into Elena's narrative voice even if she's never able to fully grasp Lila and figure her out. Revisiting her own writing, she cannot deny the terrifying hold Lila's existence has on hers. At the end of her narration, it's an entire life that she has spent by her side, regardless of either of them has realized it. Even when Lila is reduced to being Stefano's wife or a voice on the phone. Even when she seems to have succeeded in her goal of dissolving all boundaries and disappearing completely, her writing survives in a way that permeates and exists in Elena's writing and that she prolongs in the creation of a story that combines the voices of both, even snatching her from disappearance.